This disclosure relates generally to establishing message routing paths through a computer network and, more specifically, to systems and methods for establishing message routing paths through a computer network between users of message processing services and providers of such message processing services.
Routing messages through and between computer networks is a common occurrence in today's computer environment. Such routing of messages may occur within many different kinds of networks including, but not limited to, telephone networks, electronic data networks (e.g., the Internet), and transportation networks. These messages may be routed by using various computing devices such as routers, bridges, gateways, firewalls, switches or other computing devices. As these messages are routed through a computer network, these messages may be transferred from one node to another within a network, or the messages may be transferred from one computer network to another.
One example of routing computer-related messages through a network includes processing payment messages through a payment network. A payor (e.g., a cardholder) may initiate a payment with a merchant. The merchant may in turn generate a payment message that is transmitted through a payment network to one or more of an acquiring bank, a network processor, and an issuing bank. Parties participating in the payment network frequently need to contract with other parties for routing these payment messages through the network. For example, merchants providing goods and services to consumers (i.e., cardholders) may require payment message routing, and banks may require authorization and authentication services. Typically agreements between willing buyers of these message processing services and providers of such services suffer from high transaction costs as the parties must negotiate specific details of the deal, in some cases with multiple parties. Providers of such message routing services (i.e., seller parties) may have unused or underutilized capacity simply because of prohibitive transaction costs for switching between buyer parties or adding more buyer parties. Buyers of such message routing services (i.e., buyer parties) also suffer transaction costs when a selected seller has insufficient capacity, leading the buyer to go elsewhere.